Else Hirsch was a Jewish teacher in Bochum, Germany, and a member of the German Resistance against the Third Reich. She organized transports of Jewish children to the Netherlands and England, saving them from Nazi deportation to concentration camps and death. Hirsch perished in the Riga Ghetto, at the age of 53 or 54.
Mildred Elizabeth Harnack was an American literary historian, translator, and member of the German resistance against the Nazi regime. After marrying Arvid Harnack, she moved to Germany in 1929, where she began her career as an academic. Mildred Harnack spent a year at the University of Jena and the University of Giessen working on her doctoral thesis. At Giessen, she witnessed the beginnings of Nazism. Mildred Harnack became an assistant lecturer in English and American literature at the University of Berlin in 1931.
Elisabeth Schumacher was a German artist, photographer, and resistance fighter against the Nazi regime. She was a member of the Berlin-based anti-fascist resistance group that was later called the Red Orchestra by the Abwehr, during the Third Reich. Schumacher trained as an artist, but as her father was Jewish, who died in battlefield during World War I, she was classified as half-Jewish or Mischling, so worked as a graphic artist, before joining the resistance efforts.
Herbert Baum was a Jewish member of the German resistance against National Socialism. Baum organized a large network of resisters within Berlin. Most of these activists, like Baum, were Jewish and had backgrounds in the pre-1933 German-Jewish youth organizations, and most were affiliated with the German Communist Party (KPD), the Social Democratic Party (SPD), and/or their youth movements. While often described as a "Communist" (KPD) organization, in reality the Baum Group was a leftist organization that included socialists, anti-Stalinist leftists, some who were influenced by anarchism, and so on.
Jewish resistance under Nazi rule took various forms of organized underground activities conducted against German occupation regimes in Europe by Jews during World War II. According to historian Yehuda Bauer, Jewish resistance was defined as actions that were taken against all laws and actions acted by Germans. The term is particularly connected with the Holocaust and includes a multitude of different social responses by those oppressed, as well as both passive and armed resistance conducted by Jews themselves.
Zivia Lubetkin was one of the leaders of the Jewish underground in Nazi-occupied Warsaw and the only woman on the High Command of the resistance group Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa (ŻOB). She survived the Holocaust in German-occupied Poland and immigrated to Mandate Palestine in 1946, at the age of 32.
Plötzensee Prison is a men's prison in the Charlottenburg-Nord locality of Berlin with a capacity for 577 prisoners, operated by the State of Berlin judicial administration. The detention centre established in 1868 has a long history; it became notorious during the Nazi era as one of the main sites of capital punishment, where about 3,000 inmates were executed. Famous inmates include East Germany's last communist leader Egon Krenz.
The Soviet Paradise was the name of an exhibition and a propaganda film created by the Department of Film of the propaganda organisation (Reichspropagandaleitung) of the German Nazi Party (NSDAP), and was displayed in the larger cities of the Reich and occupied countries: Vienna, Prague, Berlin and others. Its goal was to show "poverty, misery, depravity and need" of the nations in the Soviet Union under "Jewish Bolshevist" rule and thus to justify the war against the Soviet Union. The accompanying guide for the exhibition noted, "The present Soviet state is nothing other than the realization of that Jewish invention".
The Saefkow-Jacob-Bästlein Organization was an underground German resistance movement acting during the Second World War, that published the illegal magazine, Die Innere Front.
Brandenburg-Görden Prison is located on Anton-Saefkow-Allee in the Görden quarter of Brandenburg an der Havel. Erected between 1927 and 1935, it was built to be the most secure and modern prison in Europe. Both criminal and political prisoners were sent there, as well as people imprisoned for preventive detention or for interrogation and prisoners of war. Built with a capacity of 1,800, it sometimes held over 4,000 during the Nazi era. After the war, East Germany used the prison to incarcerate at least 170,000 people. Prisoners were used for labor, with them making things such as tractors, kitchen furniture, uniforms and radiation suits, electric motors, shoes, and cars.
Marianne Baum was a German communist and anti-Nazi. She was executed after an attack on a propaganda show in Berlin.
Galina Romanova was a Ukrainian doctor who was deported to Germany during World War II to provide medical care for forced laborers. She became involved with the German resistance against Nazism and was executed at Berlin-Plötzensee prison.
Margaretha "Greta" Kuckhoff was a Resistance member in Nazi Germany, who belonged to the Communist Party of Germany and the NKVD spy ring that was dubbed the Red Orchestra by the Abwehr. She was married to Adam Kuckhoff, who was executed by the Third Reich. After the war, she lived in the German Democratic Republic, where she was president of Deutsche Notenbank from 1950 to 1958.
Ursula Goetze was a Berlin student and resistance fighter, who participated in political opposition to the Nazi government in Germany. In May 1942, following involvement in a leafleting campaign, she was arrested and, some time later, sentenced to death. She died by decapitation with a guillotine.
Hildegard Löwy was a Jewish German office worker who became involved in anti-Nazi resistance. She was guillotined at Plötzensee Prison.
Marianne Joachim was a Jewish German resistance activist during the Nazi years. She was executed at Plötzensee on 4 March 1943 following an arson attack the previous summer on the party propaganda department's "Soviet Paradise" exhibition in Berlin's "Lustgarten" pleasure park.
Heinz Günther Joachim was a German music student. He played the clarinet. In 1941 he became involved with an anti-government resistance group. He was arrested at work on 22 May 1942 and murdered/executed at Plötzensee Prison on 18 August 1942.
Lothar Salinger was a politically engaged German worker and part of the Jewish youth movement in Berlin, who became a resistance activist and an associate of Herbert Baum. He was executed by guillotine at the Plötzensee execution facility. His fiancée was also an anti-Hitler activist but she managed to outlive the régime, living "illegally" (unregistered) in Berlin, and some years later emigrated to California where she married Dr. Gerhard Salinger, Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Berkeley and brother to her murdered fiancé.
Rose Schlösinger was a German social worker and resistance fighter against the Nazi regime. She was associated with the Red Orchestra resistance group and passed along encrypted messages from Arvid Harnack. She was arrested in October 1942, sentenced to death by the Reich War Tribunal, and executed in August 1943.
The Baum Group was an anti-Nazi resistance group in Berlin, Germany. The Group's members were mostly Communist, Jewish, and young with many being teenagers or young adults.
